Using fetchmail, getmail, or other command-line MRAs, is there a way to retrieve only message bodies (without attachments) or only messages smaller than a given size? (This feature is available in Thunderbird, but that's not command-line friendly.)

Probably not. And strictly speaking, it's probably not possible in Thunderbird, either... as to strip out attachments requires reading the entire message contents, then discarding the unused parts--so even Thunderbird probably retrieves that data before it can discard it. What are you trying to accomplish? Conserving bandwidth, or disk space, or what?
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FlimzyJul 3 '11 at 21:22

The most important thing for me is retrieval speed. Disk space is second to that, and bandwidth usage third. I'm looking for a configuration option that tells the MRA not to download messages larger than a given size.
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OmidJul 3 '11 at 22:30